Mitt Romney's visit to the UK would have been disastrous enough if he'd just shut up after pissing off the British press, the Prime Minister, and the mayor of London. But he had to take it a step farther and go beyond insulting his host country and their Olympic efforts — in an attempt to get people to think he was cool, he strongly, vehemently disavowed interest in watching his wife's expensive dressage horse compete in equestrian events. He won't be watching at all, he says. He doesn't care! In fact, he doesn't even know what a horse sport is! Horses are for dorks!

Advertisement

The anti-horse comments came during the same Brian Williams interview that produced the puzzlingly bizarre comments about how London's Olympic preparations were inadequate because there ain't no Olympic party like a Salt Lake City Olympic party because a Salt Lake City Olympic party was organized by Mitt Romney. Williams urged Romney to share his feelings about having a personal stake in these Games; one of Romney's horses will be competing in the equestrian event. But rather than express pride in his nerdy rich guy hobby, Romney acted like he didn't know anything about the horse he'd spent a small fortune on training, maintaining, and housing. The Presidential candidate told Williams, "I have to tell you, this is Ann's sport. I am not even sure what day the sport goes on. She will get the chance to see it. I will not be watching the event. I hope her horse does well."

Romney then pretended that he didn't know how a dressage competition works, even though, as the LA Times points out, he's a huge Olympics nerd who has picked competition music for his horses in the past.

Advertisement

All of this kind of reminds me of that episode of The Simpsons when the family goes on vacation and Lisa tries to rebrand herself as a cool wearer of sunglasses who says "like, whatever" a lot. Or that part in Mean Girls when Lindsay Lohan's character pretends to be bad at math so her floppy haired crush will like her. Mitt's all, I'm not a clueless rich guy with one of the most expensive hobbies in the world! I don't even know what a hundred dollar bill looks like! Who's on that? Lance Bass? I don't like horses, I like dirt bikes and saying Git Er Done. Vote for me for America's Prom King. I will throw a kegger that doesn't serve caviar because I don't even know what that is!

Mittens, if you have to lie about your true self in order to get people to accept you, they're not your real friends.